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Challenges Facing Stockpile Stewardship in the Second Nuclear Age

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Challenges Facing Stockpile Stewardship in the Second Nuclear Age Challenges Facing Stockpile Stewardship in the Second Nuclear Age WELCOME to this issue of National Security Science. is issue is in celebration of the rst Los Alamos Primer lectures, which took place 71 years ago in the spring of 1943. ese lectures were held in conjunction with the start-up of “Project Y,” which was part of the Manhattan Project. Project Y would eventually become Los Alamos National Laboratory. e U.S. entry into the Atomic Age had been slow and cautious. But when the United States entered World War II and faced the carnage of the war, ghting and genocide had already claimed millions of lives. Obtaining the bomb before Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan was imperative. e brightest students (their average age was 24) were recruited from the nation’s best colleges and universities. ey were joined by other recruits: some of the world’s preeminent scientists—for example, Enrico Fermi, Hans Bethe, Edward Teller, and Stanislaw Ulam—many of them refugees from Nazi Germany. e recruits were told very little other than that their work might bring an end to the war. ey were given one-way train tickets to the tiny town of Lamy, New Mexico, just south of Santa Fe. ere they were met by government agents and spirited away to an undisclosed location in the mountains northwest of Santa Fe. e youthful recruits, soon to become the world’s rst nuclear weapons scientists and engineers, knew little about nuclear energy and nothing at all about making an atomic bomb. J. Robert Oppenheimer tasked his Berkeley protégé, Robert Serber, with immediately laying the necessary intellectual groundwork for the arriving scientists. Serber put the nature of their vital mission bluntly. “e object of the project,” he explained to the rst several dozen nervous new arrivals, “is to produce a practical military weapon in the form of a bomb in which the energy is released by a fast neutron chain reaction in one or more of the materials known to show nuclear ssion.” Using just a blackboard and some brief notes, Serber provided a series of ve lectures. He had developed the notes at Berkeley the previous summer while CHARLESMcMILLAN leading a series of secret seminars (which included Oppenheimer, Bethe, and Laboratory Director Teller) that explored the potential for building a nuclear weapon. He began the Los Alamos lectures by presenting an essential introductory overview of the relevant nuclear physics. Next, he unveiled the most promising approaches, developed from the secret Berkeley seminars, for building the world’s rst nuclear bomb. Following each day’s lecture, Serber’s original notes were expanded and annotated, based on the questions and discussions traded between audience participants. Formulas, graphs, and simple drawings from the blackboard were added. e resulting 24-page document was build the rst atomic bombs, but it has taken 20 years mimeographed and handed out to every newly arriving of the nation’s best scienti c e orts to get the Stockpile Project Y scientist. Stewardship Program as far as it has come today. e document, titled the Los Alamos Primer, was a How far are we? is new challenge, like the one that slim and parsimonious but powerful map. Although it began in 1943, is one with a clear objective: a safe, secure, presented a de nitive starting point and destination, and and reliable stockpile. We have made signi cant strides in contained several clear landmarks in between, the exact stewardship at Los Alamos. Our supercomputers are some route to building a nuclear weapon was still unclear. of the fastest on the planet. Our Dual-Axis Radiographic Nevertheless, Project Y’s scientists toiled with diligence Hydrodynamic Test facility is producing world-class and determination and managed, by August 1945, to radiographs. We have built plutonium pits to support the produce two completely di erent types of practical atomic U.S. Navy, and we are extending the service life of Navy weapons: Little Boy (a uranium gun-type device) and and Air Force weapons. Fat Man (a plutonium implosion device). However signi cant our successes to date, great scienti c Although the world today is very di erent from that challenges remain for stockpile stewardship—assuring of 1945, there is still a need to deal with the world’s that the deterrent remains safe, secure, and reliable dangers. e United States and its allies remain without testing requires this capability for the long term. threatened by traditional nuclear-armed adversaries Because these weapons depend on an in-depth and new nuclear powers, as well as by states of concern understanding of extremely complicated physics and and terrorist organizations seeking nuclear weapons. In because the warhead components continue to age, the this environment, the Laboratory’s mission—to do the stockpile continues to present new problems. Although pit world-class science needed to meet challenges in national aging has begun to be studied, important work remains security—has not changed. To succeed, the Laboratory’s to be done. As national and international political scientists must above all be free to think critically and and economic landscapes shi and as our science and examine all possibilities. technology improve, there is no foreseeable end in sight to As Oppenheimer put it, “ ere must be no barriers the challenges of stockpile stewardship—nor to the ways to freedom of inquiry. ere is no place for dogma in of meeting them. science. e scientist is free, and must be free to ask any Yet today’s austere budget climate threatens our ability question, to doubt any assertion, to seek for any evidence, to recruit and retain the next generation of scientists and to correct any errors. .We know that the only way to engineers, to optimally use the existing tools of stockpile avoid error is to detect it and that the only way to detect stewardship; to complete life-extension programs (LEPs) it is to be free to inquire.” with modern materials and manufacturing that fully As the Soviet Union collapsed, raising concerns about the meet U.S. military requirements while improving safety security of nuclear weapons and materials in the Soviet and security; and to build the downsized, modernized Weapon Complex, underground testing ended in 1992. infrastructure without which we will be unable to is essential tool of U.S. weapons e orts was replaced in carry out our national security mission. In this di cult 1994 by the Stockpile Stewardship Program. Los Alamos situation, the path ahead is unclear. But failure is not went from designing, engineering, and testing nuclear an option. weapons to stewarding the Laboratory-designed weapons e 2nd Los Alamos Primer lectures and discussions, that are aging in the nuclear stockpile, and doing this held in July 2013 in honor of the Laboratory’s 70th without full-scale testing. e assessments are reported anniversary, explored the changing stewardship annually to the president. landscape, sought new ways to meet its challenges, e new challenges that stewardship presented the celebrated our successes, and inspired our current and Laboratory were, and still are, daunting. Assessing the next generation of scientists. is issue o ers our readers health of the stockpile—then, now, and into the future— an overview of some of those lectures and the challenges without additional full-scale testing required building we face in stockpile stewardship during the Second new, revolutionary experimental facilities and investing Nuclear Age. in new supercomputing, engineering, and manufacturing capabilities. It took less than two-and-a-half years to National Security Science • February 2014 iii.
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